Speaker: Jeffrey
Job title: Senior Advisor: LGBTI+ Inclusion
Company: UNDP

About the spreaker
Jeffrey O’Malley works with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as its Senior Advisor on LGBTI+ Inclusion and as team leader of its health work in Africa. Jeff’s LGBTI activism began over 40 years ago in the early 1980s, when he wrote for the Canadian gay publication “The Body Politic” and was elected as the first openly gay university student union president in Canada.  Ever since that time, he has worked and volunteered at the intersection of public health, human rights and sustainable development. He worked with the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS from 1989 to 1991. Following WHO’s 1990 decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder, Jeff organized WHO’s first financial and technical support to LGBTI organizations in developing countries and worked in the WHO team that called for worldwide decriminalization of consensual same-sex conduct. In 1993, Jeff founded the International HIV/AIDS Alliance - now “FrontlineAIDS” – which he led for the following decade.  The Alliance quickly became the leading international NGO supporting community responses to AIDS in developing countries, including among LGBTI populations. Jeff first joined UNDP in 2007 as the Director of its HIV & Health group, where he led the organization to officially and explicitly take on LGBTI+ work as part of its mandate – work that has grown in scale and importance over the past 18 years. In his subsequent time as Director of Policy & Strategy for UNICEF, Jeff also led that organization to issue its first official policy position on sexual orientation, gender identity, children and families. Jeff rejoined UNDP in 2020 as the Senior Advisor on LGBTI inclusion, focusing in particular on advancing UN support to LGBTI rights, health and inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa.